Tag: needle

President Donald Trump on Thursday met behind closed doors with several top video game industry executives, association representatives, politicians and others to discuss video game violence in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last month. Among the scheduled attendees were Strauss Zelnick, CEO of TakeTwo Interactive Software, and Robert Altman, CEO of Zenimax Media, where Trump’s younger brother Robert sits on the board.TechNewsWorld

Targeted Treatment

Researchers from MIT have created a system that can deliver medicine directly to areas of the brain as small as one cubic millimeter. Using a needle the size of a human hair, the system could make it possible to directly treat diseases affecting the brain through specific circuits or regions without injuring or interacting with other nearby areas. The study has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The ultra-thin needle contains tubes that can deliver drugs deep into the brain. All of the components used are very fine, which gives the doctor performing the procedure as much control as possible in terms of placement and depth of the needle, as well as how much medication is dispensed. The researchers tested the technology on rats and were successfully able to deliver a dose of medication to a specific region of the brain that affected the rat’s motor function.

This miniature system could greatly improve the treatment of brain disorders. Image Credit: Canan Dagdeviren/Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“We can infuse very small amounts of multiple drugs compared to what we can do intravenously or orally, and also manipulate behavioral changes through drug infusion,” Canan Dagdeviren, an Assistant Professor at MIT and lead author of the paper, said in MIT’s press release.

A Tremendous Impact

The MIT researchers were not only able to successfully administer drugs to extremely specific locations, they were also able to inject a separate dose of saline to wash the drug away, which gave them maximum control when it came to dosing.

“We believe this tiny microfabricated device could have a tremendous impact in understanding brain diseases,” said Robert Langer, a professor at MIT and one of the paper’s senior authors, “as well as providing new ways of delivering biopharmaceuticals and performing biosensing in the brain.”

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